Programme

Content of the programme

Fontys Dance Academy enables young dance artists and makers to find their own voice and their own new landscape in which to move. In order to respond to the ever-changing needs of this ever-challenging work field, we know we need to dance with different vocabularies and different languages, in different places with different bodies telling different stories to audiences who are excited to listen.

To do this, students need skills, knowledge and aspirations different to those that have gone before them. Our courses are designed specifically to harness and foster both individual creativity and personal excellence to enable our students to have reach, ambition and impact - today. Fontys Dance Academy offers dance artists and makers the training to develop their own signature and create their own work, with full awareness of where and how they will contribute both to the performing arts field and society. Authentic, curious and distinctive dance artists work in an inclusive learning environment, where individual growth and co-operative exploration are equally prized.

Practical work is underpinned by an extensive and rigorous training and research programme that includes a wide range of performance and movement practices. Our students are the creators of and performers in their own work. We specifically appreciate students who challenge our ideas of what a dance artist is. We want to work with dancers from different backgrounds with an urgent interest in creative, playful, conceptual and resonant dance making.

Mindful of and excited by the multiplicity of dance careers awaiting our young graduates, we have created a course that also hones, identifies and develops the transferrable skills that allow these artists to take up significant positions throughout the performing arts field, and the wider society.

An international Erasmus+ Project - Inclusive Dance and Movement Practice: the transferable skills of the dance artist - will support this further with a co-created online platform for dance professionals.

At the heart of everything we do and everything we believe is a profound commitment to collaboration, which is why the graduate profiles Contemporary, Contemporary Urban and Bachelor in Choreography students are expected to collaborate with other arts disciplines in different locations both inside and outside traditional theatre spaces.

This is thanks to the beautiful Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts building, right in the heart of Tilburg, which we share with 14 other art schools ranging from Circus and Architecture to Visual Arts and Music. The creative conversation that takes place between these disciplines, and between the artists and their audiences, is what Fontys Dance Academy is all about.